In recent years, the annual rate of increase among physicians has remained relatively flat while the number of pharmaceutical sales representatives has grown considerably overall, even accounting for recent reductions in field force sizes. As a result, sales call effectiveness has waned in the face of a changing market and physicians' increasingly busy schedules, forcing life sciences organizations to transform their sales and marketing capabilities. Pharmaceutical companies face stiff challenges in terms of completion, cost escalation and reduction in margins, while promoting their products by sending out sales representatives to doctors, hospitals and other medical organizations. Typically the sales representatives, in the few minutes that they get with the audience/doctors, orally explain the complicated details of the medical product and then give handouts, such as presentation material on the product in paper form. A very likely result of such an approach is that after the session the audience would have already forgotten much, depending on the oral presentation skills of the representative, and the handouts most likely be thrown away. A more effective approach would be to provide the sales representative with an animated presentation that would be more engaging for the little time allotted to the presentation. During the presentation, information about the presentation could be tracked, such as how much time was spent on each segment of the presentation.
In some known presentation applications such as the Personalized Content Delivery “(PCD”) feature of Oracle® Life Sciences, the presentation is displayed as an applet in a popup window, and closing that popup window will kill the applet. Because of this, any information that was tracked for the presentation must be properly saved before closing out of the applet. Otherwise, closing the window by clicking the “X” button will kill the applet without saving the information. To ensure that sales representatives save tracked information and close out of the applet properly, it would be advantageous to disable the “X” button. However, it is not known how to do disable this button in an applet-specific way. That is, the button would have to be disabled for all browser windows, which is not desirable.